On Whether a 2,819-Pound Pumpkin Is Still, Strictly, a Pumpkin
Bartholomew Whitmore, Senior Cataloguer · produce / agriculture records
THE THICCC BEAT, the desk reacts. This week, the Senior Cataloguer, who has objections.
It is brought to my attention that on the sixth of October last, in Wargrave, Berkshire, two brothers named Paton presented a pumpkin weighing two thousand eight hundred and nineteen pounds and four ounces. The four ounces are doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and I respect them for it.
I am asked, as I am always asked, for a ruling. I will give one. But first the objection, because there is always an objection, and it is mine to file.
A pumpkin, as the catalogue defines it, is a fruit. This object weighs more than fourteen of me. It is approximately the mass of a compact car that has been informed it is produce and elected to believe it. Somewhere along the journey from "gourd" to "structure requiring a forklift and a municipal permit," a thing ceases to be a pumpkin in any sense its etymology would recognize and becomes, instead, a claim. I have filed this objection before. I file it again.
And yet. The catalogue does not rule on etymology. It rules on girth. On girth, the matter is not close.
I note, with the weariness of a man who has read the rules more often than the people who wrote them, that the American champion this season, a Mr. Dawson of Santa Rosa, two thousand three hundred and forty-six pounds, received for his trouble a cash prize, two nights at a Ritz-Carlton, and something called the Pumpkin King Champions Ring. I have no notes on the pumpkin. I have several on the ring. They are not for publication.
The ruling: Thiccc. Catalogued under Produce, Architectural. The objection stands; the pumpkin stands heavier. The committee declines to issue a ring.
Bartholomew Whitmore, who has measured larger and been less impressed.